The Historian

On the 26th Acclaim Games Inc. officially shut down its sites and games. I have to admit that part of me is very sad about this. I loved my time there and I had the pleasure of working with many very cool people.

More importantly I’m rather disappointed with Disney in the way things with the players were handled, but then the players of Acclaim were in many ways my best friends and family. I didn’t always agree with them and I was, at times, put in to situations that didn’t allow me to be soft but the most important thing I learn was this:

Your loudest and most obnoxious critics are ultimately on your side. They want things to be better, but they just can’t always communicate this in a way that is constructive. As a Community Manager you have to set aside any emotional response and see what it is that is getting them so riled up.

2Moons, aka Dekaron, has a home with its original developers, 9Dragons is going to GamersFirst, Spellborn is just dead, Bots/Bout is gone forever except on hacked servers and the rest of the games went back to their respective owners.

To everyone who ever played a game with Acclaim, I want to personally thank you. You helped me find a dream job and allowed me to learn a great deal about Community Management, myself and the gaming industry.

I’m going to have to disagree with this being a relatively “new” position. Many of us have been doing this for more than a decade. It just seems that main stream companies are starting to see the value, even if there is no visible ROI, of having someone dedicated to the Communities around them and their products.

The position of “community manager” is relatively new. It’s also increasingly important.

The person in charge of tending to your online tribe needs to possess certain skills. Obviously writing, the ability to produce multimedia content, comfort with tech, experience, work ethic and intellect matter – as they do for any modern day comms position.

He does add a few more aspects to what a company should look for in a CM. I just wonder who is going to write the “9” or “10” aspects blog post. LOL

8 traits you should look for in a Community Manager

At a young and impressionable age, I was introduced to the concept of “learning styles”. Specifically David Kolb’s learning styles model and experiential learning theory. My first contact with it was in the summer of 1989, a few years after the publication of his ‘Experiential Learning: Experience As The Source Of Learning And Development’. I won’t go into a lot of detail about it as there are other resources online that cover it. (Kolb Learning Styles)

This past week I’ve been able to receive the research of Charles Lieble, who along with C. Jay Hertzog researched the use of learning styles in the teaching of Geography. It was Charles Lieble that first introduced me to these concepts.

The reason I called this post “Full Circle” is that I have used the concepts of “Learning Styles” in my philosophies on Community Management. Because not everyone assimilates information in the same way, it is important that when presenting things to communities that you address the way that everyone captures and retains information.

Over the next few months I will now be able to show how the use of learning styles can greatly increase the growth of Online Communities as well as facilitate the rapid spread and uptake of information around your products.

I was fortunate. That is really the only way I can say it. In High School I was fortunate to have a group of friends that helped define who and what I am today.

In the past month, we have started to reconnect thanks to the power of Facebook. It is odd how easily we slip back into the comfortable patterns of old times. Our conversations seem to have picked up right where they left off 20+ years ago. We’ve changed and grown, but we are still the same in many ways.

They are my family.

I didn’t know how much I missed them until they came back.

I continue to play in the world of convenience retail, working third shift. I get to see many characters late at night. It is like there is another world that exists outside of the house of light. I see people headed for home, people starting their days. People seeking late night food, the poor purchasing ungodly amounts of lottery tickets and the fringes of society beginning or ending their days. While there is some happiness, seen in those coming from the bars after they close, most of my patrons are scraping by. They make such odd choices… the $7 pack of cigarettes and a lighter with $3 going to gas.

As for me, I continue my search for a Community Manager Position, though the picking are slim. There are just so few gaming companies out there that the number of jobs is less than the number of skilled workers. I have branched outside of gaming but those jobs are even fewer and further between. Still it is something I love and when you get paid to do what you love then you have truly succeeded and so I will continue to search.